Transportation Needs Report

The Transportation Needs Report (TNR) provides information about where improvements may be needed to Snohomish County’s transportation system. The improvements fall into different categories including:

Major road widenings

New alignments

Traffic signals

Spot safety improvements

Pedestrian and bicycle facilities

Bridges

Drainage improvements

Potential projects are identified by various work groups within Public Works including Program Planning, Traffic Operations, Engineering Services, and Surface Water Management. Needed transportation improvements are also added to the TNR in response to information provided by private citizens and other agencies. Information includes the location and type of the improvement and a priority rating.

The TNR consists of various appendices. Appendices A through J deal primarily with the County’s impact fee program. Appendices K through O deal primarily with identification and prioritization of different categories of road improvements.

Each suggested improvement is evaluated against others within the same category to determine its priority rating. Each project is evaluated based on its relative benefits, impacts, and costs compared with other projects. Based on this evaluation, each project gets a high, medium, or low priority rating. This process helps to focus the county’s limited resources on improvements that will provide the highest benefits.

The TNR provides technical support for the County’s impact fee program. Specifically, the TNR adds together the costs of improvements needed to support new development into different transportation service areas (TSAs). Various adjustments are applied to the costs, the sum of the adjusted costs in each TSA is the cost basis of the impact fees.